VOGONS


First post, by retro games 100

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

I really like the fact that I can download the latest BIOS for my Matrox G200 & Matrox G450 cards.

However, I have searched Diamond Multimedia's website for a BIOS for my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro card, and I cannot find one. Can I assume that there is no BIOS update for this card? (The BIOS is version 1.01)

Thanks, regards, Robert.

Reply 1 of 5, by leileilol

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

There's not a lot of BIOS updates for alot of cards. It's only popular nowadays so people flash for extra performance by 'zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier'. In this case, of a crappy 3d card that's Stealth 3D 2000, it's not even worth it.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 2 of 5, by crash.

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

At one point, I bought a PCI Voodoo5 5500 from a bargain bin, but it turned out to be have a Mac bios. I was able to flash it with the PC bios to make it work for me. I think that's the only time I've ever noticed a firmware change for a video card that I owned. Does the Matrox get some benefit from updating the BIOS? I have G200's in two of my systems.

Cheers!

Reply 3 of 5, by retro games 100

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

The text below has been copied-and-pasted from a thread I did earlier about Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode:

One other thing I noticed with the Matrox g2+ (g200) card was this -

I flashed its BIOS (from version 1.1 to the final version, 3.3), and I noticed that when I ran a DOS utility to detect the presence of VBE3, it said that this card had this VESA 3 standard. That is interesting, because there is a DOS utility called "gx00vbe" which is used to add VBE3 functionality to the Matrox g100/200/400 cards, but it seems this utility may not be necessary if you flash the Matrox card's BIOS to the latest final version, 3.3

Best regards, Robert.

Reply 4 of 5, by retro games 100

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t
leileilol wrote:

There's not a lot of BIOS updates for alot of cards. It's only popular nowadays so people flash for extra performance by 'zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier'. In this case, of a crappy 3d card that's Stealth 3D 2000, it's not even worth it.

Actually, now you've mentioned it, I'd quite like to get my "zomg unlockin teh pieplines so i benchmark 5 points hier"!

And that's just for my soundcard! 😉 🤣

Also, I don't think the Stealth 3D 2000 was a crappy card. It has the S3 chipset, and was very popular in its day. When playing DOS games for instance, they seem fast and smooth.